Microsoft's $1 billion payment to Nokia to get the Finnish giant to switch to …

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Bloomberg reported yesterday that Microsoft will end up paying Nokia more than $1 billion to promote and develop Windows Phone 7 handsets, citing two unnamed sources said to be knowledgable of the terms of the agreement. Nokia's commitment to the platform is also long-term: the agreement lasts more than five years, according to the sources. The people also confirmed that the final contract between the two companies still hasn't been signed. For this reason many of the details and specifics are still not public.

Microsoft will be paying some money up-front, and giving Nokia a share of advertising revenue. It will also be paying for its use of Nokia's Navteq mapping services. Offsetting this, Nokia will in turn pay Microsoft for each license it ships.

On the face of it, this sounds like a lot of money. A billion dollars just to stop Nokia plumping for Android, in a deal that isn't even exclusive—Nokia will continue to sell Symbian handsets, and even the MeeGo-powered N950 will ship later this year. Nor is a this deal going to be a quick win for Microsoft, as Nokia's Windows Phone 7 handsets aren't likely to ship in volume—or possibly even at all—until 2012.

In the short term, this deal certainly favors Nokia. The company will still be spending money on Symbian development—the company is expecting to ship 150 million of the handsets in the next couple of years—but will be able to scale back this expenditure, as its operating system development costs are increasingly pushed onto Redmond. This, plus the cash infusion, gives the company instant savings.

But longer term, this deal should prove to be a big win for Microsoft. With each license estimated to cost around $15, recouping the $1 billion will require about 60 million licenses—Nokia handsets—to be sold. And this is a five year deal: it doesn't have to be an overnight success to earn back the money. Unless Nokia implodes and the entire venture is disastrous, that level of sales should be easily achieved.

Strategically, it's even more valuable for Redmond. The Nokia deal gives Microsoft access to a brand with significant market presence around the world (except the US), valuable mapping services, and strong hardware skills. Perhaps even more importantly, the deal has ensured that the biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world has gone with Microsoft's operating system, and not Android.

The sources speaking to Bloomberg said that two features were influential in swinging the deal. As already disclosed when the companies announced the agreement, Nokia felt that Windows Phone 7 offered a greater chance to stand out in the market—something that would be rather harder in the already crowded Android market. But the investment that Microsoft could make was also key, with the implication that Google was unable or unwilling to offer a simliar incentive.

For users of the platform, the length of the deal is also encouraging. Windows Phone 7's future is far from assured. Microsoft's mobile ambitions—for Windows, for tablets, and for ARM processors—are currently something of a mystery. The company brutally killed off the KIN when it was clear that it had failed to meet expectations, and there were concerns that the company would give Windows Phone 7 the same treatment if it failed to take off. But in signing up to a five year deal, it's clear that Microsoft is in this for the long haul, and will stick with the platform to ensure its success.

There are still risks to the deal. The platform could still bomb, Nokia's handsets may all flop, or Nokia may decide that MeeGo has more to offer after all. Microsoft may have made concessions to the Finns that will undermine Windows Phone 7 as a platform. And alienation of the other Windows Phone 7 partners remains a possibility.

How these risks will play out is at the moment anyone's guess: Nokia has said that they don't intend to jeopardize the platform (though they could) and devalue the other Windows Phone 7 manufacturers, so they're saying the right things—we now have to wait to see if they follow through.

A billion dollars sounds like a lot. But to solidify Windows Phone 7's position for just a billion dollars—a billion dollars that should be earned back over the life of the deal—and to prevent Nokia from going with Android, it's an absolute bargain.

147 Reader Comments

The problem is that Nokia sells well over a 100 million smartphones a year. They didn't agree to go to WP7 in order for those numbers to decrease. They did it so the numbers would increase. If there is a big drop in sales from this, then it will have been a failure.

Thats what you say. I suspect they would be happy with an increased average selling price from pushing a high-end handset.

Its all about profit in the end. Nokia will have a higher margin due to 1) Microsoft paying for the advertising and 2) slashing their R&D budget, which is immense. Again, even with lower total sales, its win-win for them.

It's a lot more than what I say. Nokia is certainly concerned with profits, but it's their cheap throwaway phones that are throttling them. One major reason other than that is the enormous number of phones they put out. They have well over a hundred phones on the markets around the world. Because of that, they don't sell a very large number of any one model, so their R&D, marketing support, etc., is more expensive, and so their profits are less.

But they're seeing their marketshare plummet. They saw overall phone sales slip last year too. But their smartphone sales kept going up, just not as fast as the smartphone market did. Please don't tell us that they don't care if smartphone sales drop instead of continuing their rise. That would kill them, leaving sales to the cheap phones. They surely don't want that. They do want smartphone sale to continue to rise, but faster than they are now. This won't do it for them, but they don't see that.

WP7 isn't that well designed. Too much swiping to get to anything. Each screen has too little information. No real shortcuts when scrolling down names, or contacts and the like. Basically, very inefficient. It is pretty though.

I'm not really sure what you're talking about. It would be nice to have a shortcut to scroll to the end of long lists/web pages (something I'd like on iOS too, to mirror the fast scrolling to the top of the page), but it's certainly not "too much swiping".

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Well, you only care about the apps you use. What arrogance! So the apps YOU use are all people should want? And I assume that all of the ones you use are best in class? Oh, that's right, you don't know, because there aren't a number to select from, so whatever you get has to be it.

Yes, because it's simply impossible to compare software on one platform to software on another platform. And that's assuming that you're right about a lack of choice, which isn't something I've found so far.

No, I don't care that iOS has tens of thousands of cookie cutter book applications churned out in Asia. I don't intend to ever buy any of them. Nor do a great many iOS users. They're nice for stat padding, but the value they offer to the platform is negligible.

But they're seeing their marketshare plummet. They saw overall phone sales slip last year too. But their smartphone sales kept going up, just not as fast as the smartphone market did. Please don't tell us that they don't care if smartphone sales drop instead of continuing their rise. That would kill them, leaving sales to the cheap phones. They surely don't want that. They do want smartphone sale to continue to rise, but faster than they are now. This won't do it for them, but they don't see that.

Just to point something to the melgross and Dr. Pizza discussion. I think both of you in your arguments are forgetting the huge elephant in the room when profits are discussed. The marketplace. Melgross seems to be fixated on how many phones at $15 (or whatever) dollars per phone Microsoft needs to make a profit. Google, making $0.00 per phone seems to be generating a very healthy profit from Android. Where does it come from? Their own market. Factor this in and it starts to look a little better on the amount of phones that need to be sold.

Now, by sheer number, the MS Marketplace is not very big right now, but I will assure you, no developer will risk missing the ride on the big wave. Sure, it may very well fail pretty hard, but will you risk it knowing a competing developer might leave you in the dust if it doesn't? Every app sold is a profit for both the developer and Microsoft.

I think its pretty evident that the people who are vocally complaining aren't the actual users of Nokia phones or WP7. As a wp7 userwho used to use nokia I welcome this move. The people bashing MS and Nokia fall under the two groups below1. Android users who are unhappy that Nokia didn't go with android and thus cementing its place as the dominant platform, and2. Apple fanboys who are furious that their early predictions of WP7 being DOA won't come true. And if cousre they will hate on anything MS.

Don't forget the Nokia Maemo fans who are annoyed that Nokia is reducing support for MeeGo. A lot of us aren't really big fans of Apple or MS, and prefer a slightly more traditional desktop Linux implementation than Android provides.

I'm personally happy to hear that they are still planning to release at least one MeeGo handset. I don't really mind that it seems to be intended more as a experimental dev platform than a consumer device, in fact that might actually make them less likely to compromise features that I would like that might not be popular with the masses.

Personally I'd like to see some hardware standardization in the mobile device industry similar to what happened in the PC industry, where users could (well, all except apple, and even they eventually shifted architectures) choose the hardware they wanted and install the OS they want on it.

My N900 came with Maemo on it, but it can also run MeeGo, and I believe someone has released an Android image that's compatible with it. It's nice that this particular hardware is open enough to allow that kind of thing, but ideally the hardware should be standardized enough that I wouldn't an N900 version of Android, or even a Nokia version of Android. I should be able to just download a standard Android (or MeeGo, or Ubuntu, or Windows, etc) OS image, put it on a Micro SD card, stick it in any phone, and either boot directly from the SD card or install it to the internal memory, just like an Ubuntu live CD or USB stick works with a PC.

With PCs, it's gotten relatively easy for users to install an operating system. Not everyone knows how to do it, but it's to the point that I think most people could learn with a little coaching and some troubleshooting help if they run into driver problems. With phones that's not the case. In many cases, it's not even possible with closed source phone OSs, and even if I know how to install Android on my N900, it might not help me much to talk someone through installing Android on a phone that came with Win Phone 7, even if it was also from Nokia. In fact, it would most likely require some rather experience people spending significant time to package Android for that particular phone to make it happen, and it might only be possible because they have access to the Android source code.

People like to talk about how much "simpler" consumer electronic devices are than PCs, but that's only true if you stick to very simple use cases. As soon as you try to do anything slightly more complicated, PCs suddenly become an order of magnitude simpler than just about anything else out there.

With that out of the way, the claim that Nokia will not have a substantial effect on Windows Phone 7 market share is also ridiculous. Nokia sold more than 100 million Symbian phones in 2010, mainly due to their brand name. Do people seriously expect this will be reduced to say, 10 million? Seriously?

And the talk of Symbian developers walking away? What does that matter? By this time next year Windows Phone 7 will have as many apps as Symbian has now and likely many more.The Windows Phone 7 SDK has already been downloaded a million times, and the WP7 marketplace is already close to 10% of Android's numbers in only 5 months, without all the stolen trojan apps.

I went and checked your post history just to make sure you weren't astroturfing, and in the collection of previous articles I came up with this blast from the past:

[Don't forget the Nokia Maemo fans who are annoyed that Nokia is reducing support for MeeGo. A lot of us aren't really big fans of Apple or MS, and prefer a slightly more traditional desktop Linux implementation than Android provides.

A the traditional implementation with extensive standardization on known systems allowing for faster partial updates, all behind what could easily be (depending on vendor competence/carrier dickishness) a really easy to use interface.

All I want is the ability to hold a button on boot, disable any and all locks, and stick whatever OS I want on the damned thing.

Just to point something to the melgross and Dr. Pizza discussion. I think both of you in your arguments are forgetting the huge elephant in the room when profits are discussed. The marketplace. Melgross seems to be fixated on how many phones at $15 (or whatever) dollars per phone Microsoft needs to make a profit. Google, making $0.00 per phone seems to be generating a very healthy profit from Android. Where does it come from? Their own market. Factor this in and it starts to look a little better on the amount of phones that need to be sold.

Now, by sheer number, the MS Marketplace is not very big right now, but I will assure you, no developer will risk missing the ride on the big wave. Sure, it may very well fail pretty hard, but will you risk it knowing a competing developer might leave you in the dust if it doesn't? Every app sold is a profit for both the developer and Microsoft.

Nice theory but last year, even Nokia's Ovi store made more money than Android did. That's from an app store that Dr Pizza thinks is for 'feature phones' as opposed to 'application platforms'.

And alienation of the other Windows Phone 7 partners remains a possibility virtual certainty.

What other handset maker is going to stick with WP7 after this slice of favoritism?

(Did MS factor the likely abandonment of the platform by everyone but Nokia into their financial rationalization?)

I don't think that they need to worry about that. My guess is that the terrible sales of WP7 handsets is already causing all the alienation that is needed.WP7 would have been great three years ago. It would have been good two years ago. Right now it is a huge yawn.Unless there is a WP8 that is wonderful I just do not see this being more than a flop.

I don't think that they need to worry about that. My guess is that the terrible sales of WP7 handsets is already causing all the alienation that is needed.WP7 would have been great three years ago. It would have been good two years ago. Right now it is a huge yawn.Unless there is a WP8 that is wonderful I just do not see this being more than a flop.

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Samsung Chief Strategy Officer’s Omar Khan said, "You can continue to expect expansion in our Windows Phone portfolio”, adding that the current collection was selling well.HTC president of HTC for North America and Latin America Jason Mackenzie said"Obviously Windows Phone 7 is a platform we’ve invested tremendously on" and "we’ll continue to support that."All of the OEMs already invested in Windows Phone 7 promised a new bath of handsets later in the year, and it is likely that, because all of the current batch of devices were released at the same time, and the OEMs expect at least a year from each handset, they will be waiting till holidays 2011 to release new hardware.

WP7 is a fucking mess. The UI shows they are trying too hard. Updates are a mess. MS needs to rethink completely or they will lose the consumer market. Get rid of Ballmer and stop copying Zune! Zune failed...I have a Zune HD.

ur an idiot WP7 UI is better than Android even with the 2.3 update i have on my nexus one and the iOS ui is flat out retarded

Just to point something to the melgross and Dr. Pizza discussion. I think both of you in your arguments are forgetting the huge elephant in the room when profits are discussed. The marketplace. Melgross seems to be fixated on how many phones at $15 (or whatever) dollars per phone Microsoft needs to make a profit. Google, making $0.00 per phone seems to be generating a very healthy profit from Android. Where does it come from? Their own market. Factor this in and it starts to look a little better on the amount of phones that need to be sold.

Now, by sheer number, the MS Marketplace is not very big right now, but I will assure you, no developer will risk missing the ride on the big wave. Sure, it may very well fail pretty hard, but will you risk it knowing a competing developer might leave you in the dust if it doesn't? Every app sold is a profit for both the developer and Microsoft.

Nice theory but last year, even Nokia's Ovi store made more money than Android did. That's from an app store that Dr Pizza thinks is for 'feature phones' as opposed to 'application platforms'.

The Android Market is severely dysfunctional, though. There are already high profile apps making more money from sales on WP7 than on Android. Android users seem to have a real aversion to handing over their money. Google probably doesn't care, as long as the apps are ad-funded instead.

Just to point something to the melgross and Dr. Pizza discussion. I think both of you in your arguments are forgetting the huge elephant in the room when profits are discussed. The marketplace. Melgross seems to be fixated on how many phones at $15 (or whatever) dollars per phone Microsoft needs to make a profit. Google, making $0.00 per phone seems to be generating a very healthy profit from Android. Where does it come from? Their own market. Factor this in and it starts to look a little better on the amount of phones that need to be sold.

Now, by sheer number, the MS Marketplace is not very big right now, but I will assure you, no developer will risk missing the ride on the big wave. Sure, it may very well fail pretty hard, but will you risk it knowing a competing developer might leave you in the dust if it doesn't? Every app sold is a profit for both the developer and Microsoft.

Nice theory but last year, even Nokia's Ovi store made more money than Android did. That's from an app store that Dr Pizza thinks is for 'feature phones' as opposed to 'application platforms'.

The Android Market is severely dysfunctional, though. There are already high profile apps making more money from sales on WP7 than on Android. Android users seem to have a real aversion to handing over their money. Google probably doesn't care, as long as the apps are ad-funded instead.

I believe you're making too many assumptions. First of all, unless Mary is right, licensing fees will be a big consideration as to whether MS has a chance at making a profit or not. If the fee is $8, they will have to sell many more licenses than they would if it were $15.

It'll have to sell fewer than double the number. We're not talking orders of magnitude here. Whether it's $8 or $15 really doesn't make much difference. If it were $1 or $100 then yes, that'd matter a lot.

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It's likely that most Nokia buyers don't get much in the way of apps. But then, neither do Android users from the reports we've seen. There surely aren't many for WP7, and again from reports, most are pretty terrible. So are both of those being sold as feature phones, or smartphones? Pretty much the same is true of the BB.

I don't know what reports you've been reading; they certainly aren't the same ones I've read.

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I doubt if people buying Nokia smartphones don't know they're running Symbian. It's likely a few don't. Nokia has talked up Symbian for a long time. And there's certainly no way by now that those users don't know what they're using since this debacle has appeared. They certainly know that Symbian is being dropped, and WP7 will be appearing.

Nokia has talked up Symbian to developers for a long time, but I don't think this is something visible to users. They're just Nokia phones; whether they're S40 or the Symbian-powered S60 is a distinction lost on most users.

After all, it's not the Windows Phone 7 announcement that killed Symbian's long-term ambitions as a high-end platform. We've known since MWC last year that Nokia was looking elsewhere. The only thing that's changed is what that alternative is--at first it was thought to be MeeGo, now it's going to be Windows Phone 7. And yet that hasn't had much (if any) influence on Symbian sales. Symbian has been a dead man walking for a year without any detriment to its sales figures.

I think this strongly suggests that Nokia buyers substantially don't know about Symbian, and the ones that do know don't care that it's an evolutionary dead end. I think this will enable Nokia to slap Windows Phone 7 on its handsets and just keep on selling them. As long as it still says Nokia on the box, that's going to be good enough.

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I read an article that stated that HTC was expecting to sell 2 million WP7 phones in the past 4th quarter. How did that work out? I see projections all the time that are based on aspirations rather than solid reasoning. One I read the other day was by an analyst that predicted that Motorola would sell between 4.5 and 5.5 million Xoom's this year, and 6.5 million, or more, next year. Where did they get those numbers? They assumed that there would be a particular number of tablets sold overall, and that Apple would have a certain percentage, which they guessed at. Then they assume a certain number of competitive tablets, and looked at what Motorola said about the numbers they would produce, and came up with that number, as though this dispassionate analysis made sense, which of course, it doesn't. They don't factor in what the reviews say, what people are saying in response, what the interest level will really be, and a number of other factors.

I have no idea how "analysts" and others construct these numbers, and I rather suspect they don't either. It's one of the many reasons that I don't tend to report on analyst numbers. If we listened to analysts, Apple was going to sell barely a handful of iPads.

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They then assume every other number along with that. We're seeing the same thing happen here. And I'm seeing you buying into it. Why should we believe anything given to us in this affair? We shouldn't. We should be skeptical about the whole thing. There's no evidence that WP7 has gained any traction at all. Why should we assume that just because Nokia is going to be using it that it will suddenly do well?

People are going to continue to want to buy Nokia handsets. This will mean that they're going to end up buying Windows Phone 7 handsets.

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Samsung is the second largest phone manufacturer, and they're moving up as Nokia is moving down. If they can't sell WP7 phones, why should Nokia? just because they say they will? Based on what? The same type of crappy assumptions?

In my view, Samsung doesn't have the same market recognition as Nokia does. It is beginning to change that around, especially with the Galaxy branding, but there is not the same community of Samsung fans as exists for Nokia. Nokia has a great many customers who will buy a Nokia phone because it comes from Nokia. I think that Nokia can trade on its name in a way that Samsung cannot.

Dr. Pizza - Very poignant! I couldn't have said that better myself (although I tried on another blog). But I did make my point: people buy Nokia phones because of the Nokia brand name, not because of the Symbian operating system; The Symbian ^3 OS simply benefited by being on Nokia devices. WP7 will benefit as well, but I believe that the Windows Phone OS will have a lasting and greater recognition simply to due to the wonderful user experience the OS provides.

DrPizza wrote:People are going to continue to want to buy Nokia handsets. This will mean that they're going to end up buying Windows Phone 7 handsets.

Really? I think there's so little differentiation amongst hardware that I think hardware brand affinity will have a lot less impact than you seem to. They all have the same warranties and the same point-of-service. They're all black rectangles with big touch screens.

I don't work in a cell phone store, but I would imagine that 95% of customer conversations start out with "What Android/Windows/Blackberry phones do you have?" or "What do you have that's cheap or free?"

The question is will Windows provide a competitive advantage in a market where hardware is getting more commoditized daily? And if it does, then why is Nokia having to be bribed to adopt it? This whole arrangement seems so weird. We'll see. Could be a big win-win or unprecedented ultra-fail. More likely somewhere in the middle.

ARS even published an article recently about how much the smartphone and tablet market has to expand, but I think that was overblown.

When Wimdows phone launched - I said the market was saturated already, and these events prove I was right. Anyone who thinks there is room in the smart phone market needs to take an economics 101 class.

It's a lot more than what I say. Nokia is certainly concerned with profits, but it's their cheap throwaway phones that are throttling them. One major reason other than that is the enormous number of phones they put out. They have well over a hundred phones on the markets around the world. Because of that, they don't sell a very large number of any one model, so their R&D, marketing support, etc., is more expensive, and so their profits are less.

But they're seeing their marketshare plummet. They saw overall phone sales slip last year too. But their smartphone sales kept going up, just not as fast as the smartphone market did. Please don't tell us that they don't care if smartphone sales drop instead of continuing their rise. That would kill them, leaving sales to the cheap phones. They surely don't want that. They do want smartphone sale to continue to rise, but faster than they are now. This won't do it for them, but they don't see that.

Actually all the cheap Nokia phones are built around ~5 "platforms" essentially chipset/processor/software bundles. These 5 platforms are the products from nokia's production perspective. The rest is just different shells, button tabs, colors etc, i.e. Inexpensive customisation layers. The R&D and manufacturing cost goes to the 5 platforms making it a lot more manageable than it seems.

Where the number of handsets is really hurting them though is in marketing them, as the product range turns into mush and differentiation becomes impossible. Reading nokia's website shows virtually no real distinguishing features ore phone and sales staff in stores certainly can't help you pick one over the other except to say, "nokia phones are all good". This is indicative of the way in which they have totally lost the business perspective after so many years in such a dominant position, that their brand alone was a money printing press.

You are of course correct that smartphone sales are critical to them, since smart phones will replace the cheap feature phones in time (obviously talking about cheap smart phones with basic android, not high end products).

I think most people buying phones like the N8 have little or no idea what Symbian even is. Dropping Symbian as the "premium" smartphone platform will make no difference to them at all.

As an european Symbian user... I totally agree with you.

Actually, I'd go a bit further. Nokia isn't so much as dropping Symbian as a "smartphone" platform. It's that Symbian never actually managed to be a "smartphone" platform.It lacked the developer mindset and it lacked the customer mindset.

Nokia selecting WP7 as their "smartphone" platform won't have much effect on Symbian phone sales.

I think its pretty evident that the people who are vocally complaining aren't the actual users of Nokia phones or WP7. As a wp7 userwho used to use nokia I welcome this move. The people bashing MS and Nokia fall under the two groups below1. Android users who are unhappy that Nokia didn't go with android and thus cementing its place as the dominant platform, and2. Apple fanboys who are furious that their early predictions of WP7 being DOA won't come true. And if cousre they will hate on anything MS.

Digger, you need to get out of this Microsoft/Apple mindset.

Apple 'fanboys' (not users, mind) don't hate Microsoft anymore! I know, it's surprising, isn't it. I use Bing, I wouldn't like to use Windows 7 at home, but if I had to for work I wouldn't be unhappy, and WP7 is a good alternative that is making the market competitive and giving Apple reason to continue improving its products. Again, if I had to use WP7 I would not be unhappy, but iPhone integrates better with my other Apple products.

Apple fanboys are more at odds with Google because a) our supreme overload has instructed us to be, and b) we find it bizarre that people shun obviously better products for the fabulous combination of cheap Korean manufacturer+'free' advertising supported OS that looks like a cross between an illegal website and some flavour of linux.

HP/Palm and Nokia/WP7 will produce some fantastic creations and really ramp up competition in the market. Android and its manufacturing partners have not shown this.

Even if Microsoft gave nothing Nokia would be insane to switch to Android. You always want to stand out in the CE market as that is how you get margin. Just look at Apple vs Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. their margin kills the rest because they stand out.

How does WP7 allow Nokia to stand out, other than the fact that the platform is not a hit with consumers?

Personally, I think there would be a lot to be gained by Microsoft sticking to Nokia only.

Having Samsung, LG, HTC and the other shitty handset makers offering WP7 only makes sense if you don't have a major partner. By it being just WP7 and Nokia Microsoft gains Nokia's incredible market share, and Nokia gains a platform they don't have to care about (because, frankly, they're pretty bad with the whole platform thing).

Plus, a WP7 and Nokia monogamous relationship would allow for better features, with the manufacturer and software maker being able to better tailor their respective ends of the job to the other.

I agree - this is the only way in which this deal makes any sense for Nokia. Otherwise it would just be plain dumb.

I still think it's a losing strategy but going steady between MS and Nokia does make perfect sense for MS, and is not totally stupid for Nokia. MS can very easily do that by giving Nokia leeway to do whatever it wants with WP7, and / or by releasing new features only for Nokia. Given that the others have between them sold 3 WP7 handsets, they're going to drop off all by themselves anyway.

And alienation of the other Windows Phone 7 partners remains a possibility virtual certainty.

What other handset maker is going to stick with WP7 after this slice of favoritism?

(Did MS factor the likely abandonment of the platform by everyone but Nokia into their financial rationalization?)

Samsung and HTC are each rocking somewhere around a third of the Android market, which is huge and growing rapidly. How much do you think they really care about WP7 right now anyway? And unless I've missed it, LG and Dell are still minimal players in the smartphone market, and also have Android devices as well.

If Microsoft loses their current manufacturers, they're trading a couple of major players players that don't really care about making the platform succeed for a single huge player that has bet the company on WP7. That's a deal you take.